Politics Governance

Ogoni: From Agony to Hope By Sunny Awhefeada

March 24, 2025 Admin

By Sunny Awhefeada, Ogoni implicates agony whenever it is mentioned. To underscore this reality, a 1998 book titled Ogoni’s Agonies: Ken Saro-Wiwa and the Crisis in Nigeria edited by Abdul Rasheed Na’ Allah, frames the totality of the perennial agony occasioned by the exploration and exploitation of crude oil in Ogoniland. Crude oil that the Nigerian state counted as blessing became a curse to the Ogoni people as the exploratory activities of Shell and other oil multinationals turned the once lush fertile rainforest and beautiful rivers into a vast…

Rivers Lawmakers And The Drummer In The Nearby Bush

March 20, 2025 Admin

By Sunny Awhefeada Africa’s postcolonial condition is driven by a sad irony which has painfully thrust on the hapless continent the antithesis of what the people yearned for in their quest for freedom decades ago. Colonialism, which held the continent down for over a century, was calibrated as the opposite of freedom. The people fought thinking that they were fighting for freedom in the course of the anti-colonial struggle. The thinking that gave the struggle the impetus that routed imperialism was anchored on Kwame Nkrumah’s admonition that…

Babangida And The Quest For Absolution By Sunny Awhefeada

February 27, 2025 Admin

By Sunny Awhefeada A favourite statement among my contemporaries at the University of Benin in the heady 1990s was “history will absolve me” attributed to Fidel Castro, the Cuban revolutionary leader. We were fascinated by that utterance. Castro uttered those unforgettable, dense and profound words on 16th October 1953 as part of his defence when he was charged for treason after his attack on Moncada Barracks. That impassioned declaration was to become the manifesto of the Cuban revolution which led to the fall of the ruinous regime of Fulgencio…

We Are Looking for the Doctors By Sunny Awhefeada

January 30, 2025 Admin

By Sunny Awhefeada Brigadier Sani Abacha, as he then was, it was who announced the 31 December 1983 putsch that torpedoed the ill-fated government of Alhaji Shehu Usman Aliyu Shagari and sounded the death knell for the second republic. An unforgettable line in Abacha’s coup speech was that our hospitals had become “mere consulting clinics”. That criticism of our public health sector was a searing indictment of the failure of government in that sector. Although, the speech pointed to a negation of the purpose of government, we must realize…

Soludo’s Sermon By Sunny Awhefeada

January 24, 2025 Admin

By Sunny Awhefeada I do not know the last time Professor Chukwuma Soludo, the Governor of Anambra State, had the opportunity of teaching in the classroom. I surmise that it must have been more than twenty years ago before he escaped from the austere classrooms at Nsukka to join the government of former President Olusegun Obasanjo as Chief Economic Adviser and later becoming the Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria. The great teacher that he is, Soludo loves to talk and whenever he had the opportunity to do…

The Court Order! By Sunny Awhefeada

January 21, 2025 Admin

By Sunny Awhefeada The raison d’ tre of government which is the welfare and security of the citizens remains a perennially violated concept in Nigeria. Despite the multiplicity of avowals by government officials to a commitment to the twin concept of welfare and security, what Nigerians have had to contend with in the last forty years has been to suffer the breach of what ought to have been a hallowed and reassuring credo. As a nation we have backpedalled receding uncontrollably into the Hobessian jungle where life is short,…

Sand Merchants And The Shylock Syndrome

January 9, 2025January 9, 2025 Admin

By Sunny Awhefeada Humanity is ever susceptible to the changing patterns of reality and existence so that what was once inconceivable could become the norm. The ineluctability of change has continued to push boundaries beyond human imagination. In the course of time, novel phenomena emerge to engender new realities which soon evolve to become a way of life. This new “way of life” will also run its course and get subverted or replaced by another “new way of life” and humanity continues in its ever forward movement. And life…

Are These Soldiers Or Hooligans In Uniform?

November 21, 2024November 21, 2024 Admin

By Sunny Awhefeada The title adopted for today’s piece is a slightly modified, if not imitative, version of how someone labeled a post on facebook two days ago. The post in question is a video in which a helpless civilian was being pummeled by soldiers in uniform under the watchful supervision of a major-general! The victim is neither a terrorist nor a bandit! He is just another civilian accused by power drunk soldiers of denting the jeep of the major-general. As the brutes in uniform rained blows on…

A Tale of Two Videos By Sunny Awhefeada

November 14, 2024 Admin

By Sunny Awhefeada The title of this piece will tickle the memory of those familiar with the corpus of English Literature who must of necessity remember the title of Charles Dickens’ 1859 novel, A Tale of Two Cities. Dickensian imagination was inspired or better put provoked by the kind of inveterate socio-economic malaise that is afflicting Nigeria at the moment. Dickens lived and wrote in an epoch of unimaginable social rot and grinding poverty. The social, economic and cultural milieu of the Victorian Age during which English fiction bloomed…

Is Soweto Happening Here? By Sunny Awhefeada

November 7, 2024 Admin

By Sunny Awhefeada Part of the staple that formed and conditioned the consciousness of my generation was the monstrosity of the apartheid regime in South Africa. Before apartheid got dismantled in 1994, young people of my generation were active psychological participants in the events that led to the defeat of that inhumanly racist phenomenon. Our history books, literary texts, newspapers, films and other media brought apartheid and anti-apartheid engagements to us so regularly to the extent that the events, the names of persons involved and the places where…